Reading

Last month, Packt Publishing gave me a free review copy of the IBM Lotus Notes 8.5 User Guide by Karen Hooper. Finally, someone had put out a book for the end user to really utilize to be able to learn how to use the Lotus Notes client. Would it be good enough to really help a user without overwhelming them in detail?

The book starts out with an overview of the Lotus Notes interface, and does a wonderful job pointing out all the nuance in the Lotus Notes client. Clearly labeled screenshots are backed by explanation on how everything works. This chapter is essential for new users or those of you that are upgrading from the older interfaces found in version 7 of the client and earlier. You learn all about the open button, sidebar, and even the more familiar elements like toolbars and tabs. That said, many users tend to miss these details, and this chapter will really fill in the gaps of understanding they might be missing.

Next the book delves into Sametime in Chapter 2, the RSS Feed Reader in Chapter 3, and Widgets in Chapter 4. All of these chapters are very well written and give a lot of detail, but I may have shifted them around myself, as chapters 5 and 6 are really where a user is going to get the most bang for the buck. Chapter 5 goes over mastering the basics of Lotus Notes email, while chapter 6 goes more in-depth with all of the email tools (colors and recipient icons, spell check, message recall, out of office etc.)

That’s really the only misstep the book ever makes in my opinion. Users are really more likely to utilize mail, calendaring and contacts than the Feed reader or Widgets. I mean, the third chapter is devoted to the Feed reader, which no one I know utilizes as it’s functionality is so limited. But by surfacing it in the book prior to email, it seems to give it more prominence than I would have liked to see. Once again, those early chapters are well written and give tons of detail, I’d just like to see them pushed to the back of the book.

Initially I had been disappointed that there wasn’t a chapter dedicated to the vast amount of Preferences you can set in the client, but as I read the book, I found that Karen added preference sections to each of the chapters, detailing each set of preferences along with the section she was explaining. This is actually the best way to go about it, as it doesn’t overwhelm the reader with so many pages in a row dedicated to all of the settings you can configure in the client. Once again, this is perfect for the end user to get the information they need right away.

To wrap up the book, Karen included chapters on working with Notes applications, working remotely, and utilizing Lotus Symphony. Working remotely and utilizing Notes applications are two of the differentiators of Lotus Notes when comparing the client to others on the market. As such, I was thrilled to see these each get their own detailed chapter. As for Symphony, the chapter gives a brief overview how to utilize Symphony from within the Lotus Notes client, but doesn’t try to teach you anything about how a spreadsheet or word processor works. Obviously, each application could have it’s own book written detailing how to use it, so the overview did a good job not trying to cram too much of that information in. The book did include URL links pointing to information at IBM, but that was annoying to me. They should have included shortened URLs instead of something like the following: http://symphony.lotus.com/software/lotus/symphony/gallery.nsf/GallerySpreadsheets?OpenView&Count=15. Are we SURE that link isn’t going to change? Is any user going to type that behemoth in? I don’t really think so, but that’s really a minor annoyance for an otherwise really good book.

That’s the thing, there’s not much to criticize here. For many years, there wasn’t a clear, concise book showing users how to use Lotus Notes. It’s a market that has been completely lacking, and Packt Publishing and Karen Hooper have done a killer job in coming up with a book that’s easy to read, gives the appropriate amount of detail, and touches on the right things. I would have moved the chapters around a bit, and fixed the links, but if that’s all I had to criticize, you know you are in for a good read. If you have users that need some education on the Lotus Notes client, this book is just the thing. Snag your copy today!

I’m probably the last person to get around to reviewing the Lotus Notes and Domino 8.5.1 Upgrader’s Guide from Packt Publishing. I’ve been busy, and the PDF nature of the review copy personally made it hard for me to get to until I got my iPad. Having an eReader was far nicer than having to whip out the laptop each time I wanted to delve in. Anyway, for those still wanting a review, here you go.

To refresh your memory, from this book you’re supposed to learn:

Explore the new features in Domino Designer 8.5.1 that help build business and collaboration applications quickly

Get to grips with features including security, mail, calendar, and contacts

Get solutions to issues that you may encounter during the upgrading process

Quickly examine coexistence issues involved in running Notes/Domino in a mixed environment and solve them efficiently

Discover add-on products such as Lotus QuickPlace/Quickr and Lotus Sametime for a typical Notes/Domino infrastructure

Review iNotes updates and explore its new features in full mode

Integrate Lotus Domino 8.5.1 with IBM servers and tools

Save disk space by managing attachments on a per server basis using Domino Attachment and Object Service (DAOS)

Roll out your new deployment with ease by using enhancements, dynamic settings, and the Database redirect policies of Notes/Domino 8.5.1

To me, the book is a little uneven overall. I really like that someone has written a book for Notes and Domino, and I think there really is a lot of good info in here. But I think they really should have thought of this as a book someone on ND6.6 or 7 would be reading on whether or not to upgrade and really focus on ALL of the new functionality from 8.0 on. Maybe have a chapter each on what was new in Notes 8, Notes 8.5 and Notes 8.5.1. Makes it a little easier to breakdown. And, I’m really bummed that they didn’t focus on Widgets and LiveText in the book. For me, I run tons of widgets. The File Navigator from OpenNTF.org, Gist, TripIt, Tungle, and Linked-In. I use live-text all the time. To me, this is a huge omission. They really only mention it in policy and what user ID’s you are using.

They still also call Symphony the Productivity Tools, so you can tell that’s a little outdated. Some good info on it, but I would have liked to see the Symphony brand mentioned in there, if for nothing else than to keep the momentum going around that name. Also, Chapter 4 is Lotus Domino 8.5 Features, and Chapter 10 is Domino 8.5 Enhancements. I’m not sure why they split that into two chapters, and why even if they did, they didn’t put them next to each other. Just seemed weird to me.

That said, in Chapter 10, they did a great job on what I think is one of the defining features of these latest releases, and that’s DAOS, the Domino Attachment and Object Storage feature. They go into pretty good detail, and DAOS is pretty much a feature that justifies the cost of an upgrade completely on it’s own. They also do a really great job on going over the issues of coexistence between old releases and the ND8.X codestream. They even go so far as to teach you how to run both Notes clients on a workstation at one time. It could always be done, but it’s unsupported, so I thought it was really cool that the book taught people how to do it. It’s pretty useful information.

They do also have a chapter (Chapter 8) on What’s new in Notes/Domino Development. What I find curious is that the biggest feature is arguably XPages, and they don’t really give it a lot of in-depth coverage. I imagine you could write a whole book with XPages as the focus, so that could be the reason it is kind of glossed over. But still, the two biggest things with these releases are DAOS and Xpages and they do great on one aspect, and not so great on the other.

Overall, the book is pretty good and if you ARE an organization looking to upgrade from 6.5 or 7, this will be a good thing to read through to see reasons why you would want to upgrade, and what the potential gotchas are. It’s good to see books like this on Notes and Domino in the marketplace again, and hopefully Packt can clean up a couple of the omissions in future iterations of the book.

Wow. Newsgator has now made all of their consumer RSS Readers free. Nick Bradbury gives you the scoop here. They also have a FAQ concerning any questions you might have.

Looks like they will be collecting anonymous usage data, but you’ll be able to turn that off and work in a standalone mode if you want to.

I love NetNewsWire on the Mac and was a huge proponent of FeedDemon on Windows before I switched over to the Mac platform. I think they are simply the best two RSS readers on the market. And the nice thing is, they have an online service that you can hit via a browser to get your feeds and it synchronizes everywhere. So, if I open NetNewsWIre at work and read stuff, then read some stuff on my Blackberry, then read some stuff on my iPhone, then go home and work on a windows machine with FeedDemon, the feeds and unread/read statuses sync between them all.

I’ve been using this for awhile and can wholeheartedly recommend it. This is certainly a kick in the teeth to google reader in my opinion.

For all you folks that didn’t want to pay for a good client before, you can now grab one (or many) for free. I highly recommend that you do!!!

For a long while, I have really liked Fake Steve Jobs. The blog was funny. The satire attacked various conventions, companies and people, but since you knew it was fake, it was more funny than insulting.

Now we find out that Fake Steve Jobs is Daniel Lyons (via Vowe). The same Dan Lyons that has been saying Notes is dead for years, and the same Dan Lyons that wrote Attack of the Blogs. The same Dan Lyons that tried to get people fired for disputing his journalism.

In the fake blog, he called open-source advocates “freetards” and thinking that Steve Jobs was saying that was funny, because we know Steve wouldn’t really think that way. OSX is built on FreeBSD for crissakes. But we know that Dan has taken as many shots at Linux as he has at Lotus. So now freetards is far more insulting, because you know deep down the guy means it.

FSJ just allowed Lyon’s to be a total dick under the guise of satire. Trust me, his writing is more truth than satire. I’ll give him credit though. While I didn’t know who he was, he was very entertaining. Now I just feel dirty.

Once the blog moves to forbes.com, I’ll no longer subscribe. Because I don’t want any money going to that publication or it’s advertising. Maybe that’s just ME being a dick, but I can live with that.